University of Sydney, Australia.
Ageing Res Rev. 2011 Sep;10(4):397-403. doi: 10.1016/j.arr.2010.12.001. Epub 2011 Jan 25.
A number of tissues and organs in the human body contain abundant proteins that are long-lived. This includes the heart, lung, brain, bone and connective tissues. It is proposed that the accumulation of modifications to such long-lived proteins over a period of decades alters the properties of the organs and tissues in which they reside. Such insidious processes may affect human health, fitness and ultimately may limit our lifespan. The human lens, which contains proteins that do not turnover, is used to illustrate the impact of these gradual deleterious modifications. On the basis of data derived from the lens, it is postulated that the intrinsic instability of certain amino acid residues, which leads to truncation, racemisation and deamidation, is primarily responsible for the age-related deterioration of such proteins. Since these post-translational modifications accumulate over a period of many years, they can only be studied using organisms that have lifespans measured in decades. One conclusion is that there may be important aspects of human aging that can be studied only using long-lived animals.
人体内的许多组织和器官都含有丰富的长寿蛋白质。这包括心脏、肺、大脑、骨骼和结缔组织。据推测，这些长寿蛋白质在几十年的时间里积累的修饰物的积累，改变了它们所在的器官和组织的特性。这种阴险的过程可能会影响人类的健康、健身，最终可能会限制我们的寿命。人类晶状体中含有不会发生转化的蛋白质，它被用来说明这些逐渐产生的有害修饰的影响。基于从晶状体中获得的数据，人们推测，某些氨基酸残基的固有不稳定性，导致截短、消旋和脱酰胺作用，是导致这些蛋白质与年龄相关的恶化的主要原因。由于这些翻译后修饰物在多年的时间里积累，因此只能使用寿命以十年为单位来衡量的生物体进行研究。一个结论是，只有使用长寿动物，才能研究人类衰老的某些重要方面。
